Noreen. Sister to some. Mother to a few. To me and my siblings, she was always granny. Right until the very end. It always sounded kind of juvenile whenever I said it in front of anybody else except The Family. But, it just felt right. Like she'd been born a kindly old grandmother, skipping all of that messy stuff between birth and old age. She seemed to be one of the few constants in a constantly changing world.
Eighty-eight years. It was, as they say, a decent run. From my own selfish perspective, a lifespan like that boded well. Despite a few rough spots like her heart and circulation issues, including (if memory serves) a quadruple bypass (at least a triple), and her knee replacements, she was a tough old bird. It wasn't really until the last year when her health really took a turn, as it turns out, a trajectory from which she would never recover.
I wonder sometimes. All of the stories I never heard. All the stories I never will hear. All of them lost to time. Adventures that unfolded before even my mother was a twinkle in my grandmother's eye, a story told as it unfolded, and then ended, never to be told again. It's strange now to think that the person I knew is now consigned to exist, for me, only as a memory. It's a strange transition. A metamorphosis of personhood. From memory maker to the remembered.
And I do remember.
I remember granny and grandpa's house.
Gone now. Sold to a strange family that would never know about all of the love and anger and joy and hate and life that it had witnessed. Entire generations of memories soaked up by those walls. Now wrung out and hung out to dry by some squatters.
Granny and grandpa's house always meant that something exciting was happening. An oasis of the extraordinary in a desert of the mundane and the everyday. It was where we celebrated birthdays and holidays, most notably Easter and Thanksgiving.
It was a place where we could drop in unannounced at virtually any time of day, any day of the year, and be greeted enthusiastically by smiling faces, bowls of candy, and fridges full of pop. We would tell our stories, and they would tell theirs, and there was a warmth there and a sense of comfort and belonging that won't ever exist again--at least not in that same way--outside of those walls and those two people.
I remember Thanksgiving dinners.
For those big gatherings, we'd pile around an extended table in a dining room that was far too small for the fifteen or so core family members. With the extra leaves, people at one end of the table wound up in the living room. People on the far side were strapped in for the duration; there would be no bathroom breaks until the meal was over. And in a house that only had one bathroom, that wait time could extend by a decent amount, which could spell doom for all but those with the most iron clad of bladders and stoutest of constitutions.
The fridge in the basement was always stocked with a variety of sugary soda pop. The rec room walls were lined with pictures of relatives long-dead, their creepy eyes following you around the room; if anything in this world was ever, indeed, haunted, it would have been those terrible pictures. Shelves full of old board games in the basement provided after-dinner entertainment for the adults while the children would watch movies or play pool (or some variation thereof) as we retreated to the basement to avoid the prospect of having to help with the after-dinner cleanup in any capacity.
I remember Password.
Fucking Password. My siblings and I were bred on board games as a primary form of social interaction (a trend that, for me, manifests itself to this day in the form of heavier weight fare), and I didn't mind most of them, but for some reason I detested Password.
Granny loved it.
I did feel bad, sometimes, that she didn't always get to play. Not so bad that I'd actually suggest that the family play the damn thing. We played enough for me to grow to hate the damn thing, maybe in part because I found the game so tedious, maybe in part because so many members of my family couldn't follow the rules to follow their lives (well, mostly dad). Invariably when we play it again at some family gathering or another, the thoughts of everyone in the room will, of course, turn to my grandmother, and rightfully so. Password was a part of her kingdom she ruled with an iron fist.
I remember summers at the beach.
Every summer when we were young, my brothers and sister and I would take turns (sometimes two at a time) sleeping over at granny and grandpa's house for a week at a time. For a stay-at-home mother like hours, sending away half of her kids for a week was the closest she ever got to a vacation. Granny would always take us down to a beach in Petawawa, the Catwalk it was called, a man-made lagoon on the outskirts of the local military base and hemmed in by beaches on three sides and rapids on the other. The catwalk from whence the place got its name was a massive concrete barrier that ran around half the swimming hole, helping to keep it all in place. The rapids were out of bounds for kids our age, and besides, we were just as happy swimming and splashing around in the murky waters.
Granny would always pack up a bunch of pop and ice in one of those Styrofoam coolers and a couple of bags of chips to snack on. I remember helping to haul all of the gear from the parking lot to the beach: the cooler, the swim bag with towels and the bags of chips, and those old folding lawn chairs with the metal frames that have long since been replaced with the modern collapsible camp chairs that are far easier to lug around.
We would swim around while my grandmother would usually watch us from her lawn chair, the big lounger version so she could stretch out her legs, with a book in one hand, and an eye each for the book and the water.
One time after we got changed, an angry woman came up to us and started yelling at my grandmother, accusing us of locking the changing room door after we left, so that nobody else could use it and reducing the capacity from three to two rooms, a cardinal sin during the busy season. Granny didn't hesitate for a second in defending us, calmly explaining to the angry lady that it was some misunderstanding. I was glad that, in this instance at least, her defence of us was not unwarranted.
I remember driving practice.
Once I had my driver's licence, I jumped at any chance I could to drive. My grandmother obliged, and would often let me drive her to and from church, in her old blue station wagon. It was a short enough drive from granny and grandpa's to the church, but it was always nice to be trusted even that far.
I remember the gardens.
Before she had her knees replaced, granny's gardens were the stuff of family legend. Out back were the vegetables, a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers, but up front were the flowers. There must have been a patch at least forty feet long by six feet deep at the front of granny and grandpa's house, just before the culvert. I didn't fully appreciate it as a child, but thinking on it now, it was quite a feat. There were flowers of all varieties, name a colour in the rainbow and you could probably find it in granny's garden. There were pathways of stone, and at one point there was a trellis archway in the middle of it over one of the pathways.
It must have taken an incredible amount of work to maintain those flowers. As a kid, granny's garden was the place that you didn't want your ball or frisbee to land, because then you'd get yelled at by some adult or another, but looking back, it seemed to be a living extension of my grandmother, embodying all of her vitality and vibrancy.
I remember the quilts.
Granny was a part of the quilting group at her church, and they would get together once a week and set up in the nursery in the basement. They would sometimes give the quilts away to families in need, sometimes sell them at church fundraisers for one charity or another.
Eventually, she took the hobby home with her, got the necessary frame, and would set up in the dining room to craft quilts of her own for the family, now heirlooms, I suppose. My mother followed in her mother's footsteps and took up quilting, sometimes at granny and grandpa's house, sometimes at our own house.
My grandmother even roped in my grandfather, who contributed a not insignificant amount of stitching to some of these creations. In one corner of each of her creations for the family, she'd put her name, date, and sometimes who the quilt was made for. A Noreen original.
I remember crab apple jelly.
In the front yard of my grandparent's house, across the driveway from the garden, stood a crab apple tree. Sometimes when we'd visit, we'd eat apples right off the tree, our lips puckering at their bitterness. Every year, my grandmother would would whip up her annual batches of preserves, mostly crab apple jelly with apples picked from the one in the front yard and chokecherry jelly with chokecherries picked from bushes from the side of the road. My mother would take up this hobby as well, enlisting the help of my siblings and I, dragging us outside in the summer heat to fill buckets with those road berries.
Boiled so that the stench filled the whole house and filtered through pantyhose (I assumed it was new, though never thought to ask...), the end result was carefully stored in glass mason jars embossed with fruits or vegetables or vines of some variety, topped off with those two-piece metal lids and left to cool. Each jar labelled with the contents and date on a small piece of paper scotch taped to the side or written directly on a piece of masking tape. The taste of those jams and jellies now preserved in my memory just as surely as those sugared juices were preserved in those jars. Safe from aging until the container itself was breached or broken in some way.
I remember all of these things, and more. I remember her kindly laugh; the needlepoint pictures of her family and her church; the wooden swing on the front yard where we'd sit sometimes and rock back and forth; Saturday dinner on TV trays while we watched a show in the living room (Saturday was hamburger night); that one beer that she'd have at family functions, poured into a glass; the false teeth that I'd had a morbid fascination with as a child the first time I saw her without them; her youthful enthusiasm acting out clues in a game of charades; the life in her step as she shot up out of her chair to dance with whoever was still standing at the end of the night at whichever family member's wedding we were celebrating.
I do remember. And I will remember. It's the memories we're left with, and the memories we leave. And my memories of granny are all good ones.
Aren't they all?
Eighty-eight years. It was, as they say, a decent run. From my own selfish perspective, a lifespan like that boded well. Despite a few rough spots like her heart and circulation issues, including (if memory serves) a quadruple bypass (at least a triple), and her knee replacements, she was a tough old bird. It wasn't really until the last year when her health really took a turn, as it turns out, a trajectory from which she would never recover.
I wonder sometimes. All of the stories I never heard. All the stories I never will hear. All of them lost to time. Adventures that unfolded before even my mother was a twinkle in my grandmother's eye, a story told as it unfolded, and then ended, never to be told again. It's strange now to think that the person I knew is now consigned to exist, for me, only as a memory. It's a strange transition. A metamorphosis of personhood. From memory maker to the remembered.
And I do remember.
I remember granny and grandpa's house.
Gone now. Sold to a strange family that would never know about all of the love and anger and joy and hate and life that it had witnessed. Entire generations of memories soaked up by those walls. Now wrung out and hung out to dry by some squatters.
Granny and grandpa's house always meant that something exciting was happening. An oasis of the extraordinary in a desert of the mundane and the everyday. It was where we celebrated birthdays and holidays, most notably Easter and Thanksgiving.
It was a place where we could drop in unannounced at virtually any time of day, any day of the year, and be greeted enthusiastically by smiling faces, bowls of candy, and fridges full of pop. We would tell our stories, and they would tell theirs, and there was a warmth there and a sense of comfort and belonging that won't ever exist again--at least not in that same way--outside of those walls and those two people.
I remember Thanksgiving dinners.
For those big gatherings, we'd pile around an extended table in a dining room that was far too small for the fifteen or so core family members. With the extra leaves, people at one end of the table wound up in the living room. People on the far side were strapped in for the duration; there would be no bathroom breaks until the meal was over. And in a house that only had one bathroom, that wait time could extend by a decent amount, which could spell doom for all but those with the most iron clad of bladders and stoutest of constitutions.
The fridge in the basement was always stocked with a variety of sugary soda pop. The rec room walls were lined with pictures of relatives long-dead, their creepy eyes following you around the room; if anything in this world was ever, indeed, haunted, it would have been those terrible pictures. Shelves full of old board games in the basement provided after-dinner entertainment for the adults while the children would watch movies or play pool (or some variation thereof) as we retreated to the basement to avoid the prospect of having to help with the after-dinner cleanup in any capacity.
I remember Password.
Fucking Password. My siblings and I were bred on board games as a primary form of social interaction (a trend that, for me, manifests itself to this day in the form of heavier weight fare), and I didn't mind most of them, but for some reason I detested Password.
Granny loved it.
I did feel bad, sometimes, that she didn't always get to play. Not so bad that I'd actually suggest that the family play the damn thing. We played enough for me to grow to hate the damn thing, maybe in part because I found the game so tedious, maybe in part because so many members of my family couldn't follow the rules to follow their lives (well, mostly dad). Invariably when we play it again at some family gathering or another, the thoughts of everyone in the room will, of course, turn to my grandmother, and rightfully so. Password was a part of her kingdom she ruled with an iron fist.
I remember summers at the beach.
Every summer when we were young, my brothers and sister and I would take turns (sometimes two at a time) sleeping over at granny and grandpa's house for a week at a time. For a stay-at-home mother like hours, sending away half of her kids for a week was the closest she ever got to a vacation. Granny would always take us down to a beach in Petawawa, the Catwalk it was called, a man-made lagoon on the outskirts of the local military base and hemmed in by beaches on three sides and rapids on the other. The catwalk from whence the place got its name was a massive concrete barrier that ran around half the swimming hole, helping to keep it all in place. The rapids were out of bounds for kids our age, and besides, we were just as happy swimming and splashing around in the murky waters.
Granny would always pack up a bunch of pop and ice in one of those Styrofoam coolers and a couple of bags of chips to snack on. I remember helping to haul all of the gear from the parking lot to the beach: the cooler, the swim bag with towels and the bags of chips, and those old folding lawn chairs with the metal frames that have long since been replaced with the modern collapsible camp chairs that are far easier to lug around.
We would swim around while my grandmother would usually watch us from her lawn chair, the big lounger version so she could stretch out her legs, with a book in one hand, and an eye each for the book and the water.
One time after we got changed, an angry woman came up to us and started yelling at my grandmother, accusing us of locking the changing room door after we left, so that nobody else could use it and reducing the capacity from three to two rooms, a cardinal sin during the busy season. Granny didn't hesitate for a second in defending us, calmly explaining to the angry lady that it was some misunderstanding. I was glad that, in this instance at least, her defence of us was not unwarranted.
I remember driving practice.
Once I had my driver's licence, I jumped at any chance I could to drive. My grandmother obliged, and would often let me drive her to and from church, in her old blue station wagon. It was a short enough drive from granny and grandpa's to the church, but it was always nice to be trusted even that far.
I remember the gardens.
Before she had her knees replaced, granny's gardens were the stuff of family legend. Out back were the vegetables, a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers, but up front were the flowers. There must have been a patch at least forty feet long by six feet deep at the front of granny and grandpa's house, just before the culvert. I didn't fully appreciate it as a child, but thinking on it now, it was quite a feat. There were flowers of all varieties, name a colour in the rainbow and you could probably find it in granny's garden. There were pathways of stone, and at one point there was a trellis archway in the middle of it over one of the pathways.
It must have taken an incredible amount of work to maintain those flowers. As a kid, granny's garden was the place that you didn't want your ball or frisbee to land, because then you'd get yelled at by some adult or another, but looking back, it seemed to be a living extension of my grandmother, embodying all of her vitality and vibrancy.
I remember the quilts.
Granny was a part of the quilting group at her church, and they would get together once a week and set up in the nursery in the basement. They would sometimes give the quilts away to families in need, sometimes sell them at church fundraisers for one charity or another.
Eventually, she took the hobby home with her, got the necessary frame, and would set up in the dining room to craft quilts of her own for the family, now heirlooms, I suppose. My mother followed in her mother's footsteps and took up quilting, sometimes at granny and grandpa's house, sometimes at our own house.
My grandmother even roped in my grandfather, who contributed a not insignificant amount of stitching to some of these creations. In one corner of each of her creations for the family, she'd put her name, date, and sometimes who the quilt was made for. A Noreen original.
I remember crab apple jelly.
In the front yard of my grandparent's house, across the driveway from the garden, stood a crab apple tree. Sometimes when we'd visit, we'd eat apples right off the tree, our lips puckering at their bitterness. Every year, my grandmother would would whip up her annual batches of preserves, mostly crab apple jelly with apples picked from the one in the front yard and chokecherry jelly with chokecherries picked from bushes from the side of the road. My mother would take up this hobby as well, enlisting the help of my siblings and I, dragging us outside in the summer heat to fill buckets with those road berries.
Boiled so that the stench filled the whole house and filtered through pantyhose (I assumed it was new, though never thought to ask...), the end result was carefully stored in glass mason jars embossed with fruits or vegetables or vines of some variety, topped off with those two-piece metal lids and left to cool. Each jar labelled with the contents and date on a small piece of paper scotch taped to the side or written directly on a piece of masking tape. The taste of those jams and jellies now preserved in my memory just as surely as those sugared juices were preserved in those jars. Safe from aging until the container itself was breached or broken in some way.
I remember all of these things, and more. I remember her kindly laugh; the needlepoint pictures of her family and her church; the wooden swing on the front yard where we'd sit sometimes and rock back and forth; Saturday dinner on TV trays while we watched a show in the living room (Saturday was hamburger night); that one beer that she'd have at family functions, poured into a glass; the false teeth that I'd had a morbid fascination with as a child the first time I saw her without them; her youthful enthusiasm acting out clues in a game of charades; the life in her step as she shot up out of her chair to dance with whoever was still standing at the end of the night at whichever family member's wedding we were celebrating.
I do remember. And I will remember. It's the memories we're left with, and the memories we leave. And my memories of granny are all good ones.
Aren't they all?
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